This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Art from Pelham Bay to Fort Jay

Zak Krevitt’s photos of the puppy play fetish community open Thursday night at Ray Gallery in Brooklyn.

Okay, now that we’re on the brink of September, New York is coming back to life. And what a life it is—from anarchist spots in Bushwick to mansions in the Bronx, holograms on Governors Island to museums is Astoria—we’ve dug deep to find you the best, weirdest, and most under-represented stuff to do this week across the city.

Tuesday is your last chance to see Cao Fei’s solo show at PS1, and she’s speaking at Pratt that evening. So take a G train jaunt from the museum to the Pratt campus and also catch the closing reception for their Fine Arts MFA thesis exhibition before the talk. Wednesday, get digital u/dys-topian thinking with the surreal architectural images of Dionisio Gonzalez at Galerie Richard and the new Anarcho Tech Collective at The Base. Thursday, Carolina Nitsch Project Room is hosting two projects spanning 50 years of collective Art & Language, and Zak Krevitt’s solo show at Ray Gallery takes viewers inside the world of the “puppy play” fetish.

Friday, the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum in the Bronx is throwing an opening reception for its centennial garden celbration. The museum has commissioned over a dozen sculptures to respond to sites in its formal gardens. Saturday, head to another overlooked landmark across town: the Governor’s Island Art Fair is bringing work such as Julia Maria Sinelnikova glittery, tech-heavy installations to the historic Colonel’s Row. Then, World Money Gallery is hosting a two-artist salute to Bushwick’s litter (the last line of defense against gentrification?). Finally, spend Sunday unwinding in the serene Noguchi Museum, but don’t worry about spending money—it’s a free admission “Community Day.”

There’s finally no excuse to be bored this week. It’s a big city out there. Go explore!

Tue

Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery

Pratt Institute Fine Arts MFA Exhibition 2016 Closing Reception

This is the last chance to catch the thesis exhibition of Pratt’s 2016 Fine Arts MFA class. We haven’t seen it yet, but it promises to be a fun show because the program isn’t medium-specific, so there’s a mix of painters, sculptors, photography and more.

Pratt Institute

Visiting Artists Lecture Series - Cao Fei

Also at Pratt, immediately following the MFA closing reception, Cao Fei is giving a lecture about her digital pop-surrealist practice. Fei’s show at PS1 also closes Tuesday, which includes documentation of Chinese cosplayers, among other pieces of digital subculture ephemera. Fei’s work frames or constructs escapist fantasies that point to some elusive sociopolitical truth. It’s so smart and uncanny, so definitely try to see the show (if you haven’t already) before the talk.

Wed

Galerie Richard

Dionisio Gonzalez

Dionisio Gonzalez’s digital prints combine photographs of the built environment with his own architectural interventions. What results is a bizarre “what if” of possible futures and alternate pasts. For example, one series imagines what Venice might look like had Le Corbusier’s 1960s plans for a modernist hospital complex had been realized. Another depicts a (futuristic?) Dauphin Island where climate-resistant houses are splattered with kelp from storm surges. There’s never a clear indication if these hypothetical man-un-made landscapes are dystopias or utopias—the subjective judgements are the viewer’s alone.

The Base

Anarcho Tech Collective

Has anyone else been watching Mr. Robot and dreaming of a new career as a hacktivist? There’s a meetup for tech-savvy activists/politically-minded techies to brainstorm and cooperate. Anarcho Tech Collective offers the following invitation: “If you’re a programmer, designer, IT specialist, NetSec pro, or anyone with a knack for technology, and you believe in the building a world without state, class, money, or borders, come join us to hack the revolution!”

Thu

Carolina Nitsch Project Room

Art & Language

In 1966 four British professors—Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, Harold Hurrell and David Bainbridge—formed the publishing/art collective Art & Language. Their first text, PAINTINGS I, 1966, was an early conceptual art text that cemented their place as a group that would go on to influence the art world in the 1970s. They’ll be displaying that original work alongside a new piece, created 50 years later titled These Scenes. The new work is purportedly inspired by Malevich and his “Black Square.” If this all sounds pretty heady, that’s because it is. But those art historian nerds like us will be geeking out about it all day in Chelsea.

Ray Gallery

Zak Krevitt: Alpha, Beta, Omega

One of the benefits of living in weird, weird 2016 is the ability to always find like-minded individuals for seemingly any interest, hobby, or fetish. I’ve always enjoyed Zak Krevitt’s gorgeously-shot documentation of queer subcultures as evidence of this, and his latest series Alpha, Beta, Omega might be the best yet. Krevitt has documented his involvement in the “puppy play” scene, where men wear latex dog costumes and act out animal impulses—wrestling, humping, S&M play—as an escape from the anxiety accompanying day-to-day obligations and social norms. They photos take on an even more surreal tension with their context—many of them are shot in convention centers, hotel rooms and pools, and other anonymous corners of the blandscape.

Fri

Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum

Garden Centennial Exhibition Opening Reception

The Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum is one of those gems in the Bronx that most New Yorkers probably never see. Now’s a good chance. To celebrate 100 years of its formal gardens, the museum has commissioned more than a dozen site-specific sculptures in a variety of media tasked with responding to natural or architectural contexts. I can’t think of a more pleasant-sounding art opening on a Friday night than a stroll through gardens at a (relatively) secluded mansion.

Sat

Colonel’s Row

Governor’s Island Art Fair

There’s not a lot of familiar names in this year’s Governor’s Island Art Fair, but maybe that’s a good thing? At any rate, it’s free (after a $2, gorgeous ferry ride from Lower Manhattan) and a rare excuse to head to the strange little island to check out the new “Hills” park.

Be sure to catch Saṃjñā ⌘, a solo show from Julia Maria Sinelnikova (of Vector Gallery fame) presented by the Center for the Holographic Arts. Sinelnikova meticulously cuts mylar and other reflective materials into lace-like sculptures with video projections. They’re kinda what I imagine watching a disco ball underwater while taking LSD would be like.

World Money Gallery

Hot Garbage

This two person show purportedly considers “trash” in the context of gentrifying Brooklyn. I really love David Henry Nobody Jr’s collage-and-garbage drag self-portraits, wherein he wraps himself with images of models from discarded magazines and applies globs of various gross materials to become uncanny monster-covergirls. They hit a few of the same notes as Jaimie Warren’s self-portraits. But his new work uses female models, foam, and apparently packs of cigarettes to create creatures evocative of Marjorie the Trash Heap. Will these be as successful? That remains to be seen, because so much of the charm of “Nobody’s” photography has always been about the creepy transformation of the self.

Emily Miller’s painterly still-lives of crumpled, discarded Newport cigarette packs from Bushwick sidewalks, conversely, are all about elevating the mundane to the precious. I can’t tell if I like these because they’re good paintings or because they really make me miss my days of smoking menthol 100s. Either way, that’s something.

Sun

The Noguchi Museum

Community Day

On Sunday, The Noguchi Museum is offering free admission, and events such as a 2 p.m. guided tour and a 4 p.m. discussion of a Noguchi’s 1941 sculpture ‘Contoured Playground” (pictured). The Noguchi Museum is so great everyone should make at least an annual pilgrimage. On a Sunday where there’s not much else going on and admission is free, I recommend doing just that.